Oh yeah, bots and spammers for sure. There are bots (see the other thread about the ban wave today - they're fighting them), and there are spammers (one reason why I left all channels). Some people get dozens of "friend requests" by gold spammers.
But this doesn't affect me personally; bots decrease prices a bit by accelerating inflation, okay. But as long as real cheats or dupes aren't rampant, Blizzard has succeeded, in my opinion.
I agree with OP, but...it's just that online only is a pain in the...ahm...a nuisance for the likes of me.
Since I put my hands on a Diablo game I played single player, I never felt the need for trade nor multiplaying, even if I liked community life a lot.
D3 imposed on me the limitations of both AH and online only.
I was one of those who argued against the AH system and set my resolve to play self found since release.
I still think it was the best choice for me, it reduced somewhat the impact of the AH.
But I couldn't do and cannot do and will not be able to do anything about lag spikes, disconnections and the like.
I cannot play HC, I cannot even play multiplayer.
I played a couple of times with Maka and enjoyed it but the game keeps lagging and lagging and it's tiring after a while.
Yet I understand the reasons behind it and accept the fact that we have to keep up with it even if it's just for lack of a better alternative.
They'd have to quite literally re make the game to create an offline mode that couldn't hurt the online one.
Well, why not do that? No really, why not make a version of the game that can ONLY be played offline and does not interact with bnet in any way, other than to download updates? I'm sure there's a cost issue involved, but certainly less than what they had for console.
D2's servers are alive and kicking. But I don't need to remind you of that, hopefully.
No, I'm well aware of that. But I imagine the D3 servers are quite a bit more expensive to maintain. As Shade mentions above, they will likely introduce some new type of microtransaction. What happens when people stop buying those?
And like I said, 2-3 years is unrealistic. Even 20 years is probably stretching it. We're talking VERY long-term.
I don't see how that would be the case. What makes them that much more expensive? Do you know the technology behind them?
This is a valid arguments when it comes to Blizzard's competition, which constantly fails and close their servers (Warhammer Online being the latest example), but it has never been the case for Blizzard. Plus, the less people that play the less servers will be engaged in hosting them. The cost is already reduced.
The question is are there people working on that product while servers are also being maintained. That's what leads to big games failing, when dozens or hundreds of people are still working on them, but there's almost no return. That's not the case with the 20-something team that Diablo has. Diablo II is at this point on auto-pilot, with likely very small portion of the servers maintaining it. It costs Blizzard almost nothing to keep them up. But that's primarily because no one is working on it anymore.
Honestly, knowing that you can still play WarCraft II and Diablo I in Battle.net, I see no reason why Diablo III wouldn't exist 20 years from now. Unless Blizzard ceases to exist.
D2's servers are alive and kicking. But I don't need to remind you of that, hopefully.
No, I'm well aware of that. But I imagine the D3 servers are quite a bit more expensive to maintain. As Shade mentions above, they will likely introduce some new type of microtransaction. What happens when people stop buying those?
And like I said, 2-3 years is unrealistic. Even 20 years is probably stretching it. We're talking VERY long-term.
I don't see how that would be the case. What makes them that much more expensive? Do you know the technology behind them?
This is a valid arguments when it comes to Blizzard's competition, which constantly fails and close their servers (Warhammer Online being the latest example), but it has never been the case for Blizzard. Plus, the less people that play the less servers will be engaged in hosting them. The cost is already reduced.
The question is are there people working on that product while servers are also being maintained. That's what leads to big games failing, when dozens or hundreds of people are still working on them, but there's almost no return. That's not the case with the 20-something team that Diablo has. Diablo II is at this point on auto-pilot, with likely very small portion of the servers maintaining it. It costs Blizzard almost nothing to keep them up. But that's primarily because no one is working on it anymore.
Honestly, knowing that you can still play WarCraft II and Diablo I in Battle.net, I see no reason why Diablo III wouldn't exist 20 years from now. Unless Blizzard ceases to exist.
Knock on wood.
But you're right, I really have no figures to back that up (nobody outside Blizzard does), and you're probably right about the costs going down once they stop active development.
Except that the online-only failed to provide a cheat-free environment. Bots are very numerous and efficient. Just go read some forums, they're even public so you can get a general idea of how it works etc.
Well there's a big difference between a bot, which although is against the ToS, is not hacking (it's process automation), and duping/hacking.
Online-only squelched all duping from hacking (by that I mean decompiling the server code to exploit client-server interactions and create duplicate items). The only "duping" that existed in D3 that we know of was from account rollback exploits which is a customer service procedural issue and not an issue of hacking... and the RMAH gold duping bug, which was a bug, and not a hack.
The point being is that online-only actually has been tremendously successful at preventing duping/hacking. It's been so successful that botting is basically the only way to earn things without really earning them if you get my drift. The problem is that eliminating botting is much more difficult since bots are 3rd party programs and not related to secure code. Blizzard cannot do anything to stop simulated input (mouse clicks, etc), and they can't do anything about programs that read and interpret pixels on your screen... there's just no way to code against that. However, and I don't have any blue posts from back then, I don't believe Blizzard actually promised that online-only would prevent bots. If anyone has a link to the contrary, I'd love to see it, because that seems like a very naive statement to make for software developers who HAVE to understand that online-only won't do anything for bots.
The last thing I'd like to point out is that curbing duping is far more important than curbing botting. A duper can create "wealth" orders of magnitude faster than bots. The main appeal of bots is that you can gain items/gold while you normally wouldn't be playing. However, a duper, with a little work can make a couple 9/6 Mempos with 190+ main stat. In just a little time they can create wealth that would take a bot months to acquire normally. This was even evidenced by the RMAH gold duping bug - the amount of wealth that was created in a very short period of time by a relatively small percentage of the population far outstripped what that number of bots could accomplish in the same timeframe probably by several orders of magnitude.
With the RMAH gone, bots almost certainly will take a hit (and probably a large hit). Although, frankly, Loot 2.0 seemed pretty poised to taint the botters water. But, due to the fact that it's certain that fewer people will use 3rd party sites as compared to the RMAH, there MUST be less demand (even if demand actually goes up in the very short term) for the long haul.
The best way to combat bots is to make people not desire to swipe the credit card, not to try to ban the software. Hackers are ALWYAS one step ahead. It's a losing effort.
Just one thing to add: bots are very difficult to detect because a perfect player behaves exactly like a bot (no chatting, no social interaction, pure killing with optimal pathways and minimal downtime). A WW barb on a long weekend streak to farm the last 30 paragon levels "looks" 1:1 the same like a bot. Duping, however, can be prevented by an "online-only" mode, as every item has to be stored on the server and every item gets a unique ID, and the game can always check if this ID is really unique. Unless dupers find a way to dupe the item but altering the ID, duping is impossible. I would've never dared to say this 15 months ago, but it really seems like Blizzard found a way to stop (program code related) duping. I guess they know how to do it from WoW ;-)
But I still think bots were a pretty large factor in getting the economy to where it is today.
Oh, ermm, I wasn't attempting to downplay the effect bots have, I was just trying to put some perspective to it all. Sorry if it sounded like I was saying that bots aren't a problem - they clearly are.
I just wanted to point out that duping has much more massive repercussions and is much easier to put a virtual lock on whereas botters have more modest repercussions and, no matter how much time is invested, will never be outright eliminated.
If you have to pick and choose your battles, it seems obvious to me that you'd take the dupers out of the equation, given how easy it is, and then work to mitigate the bots as best you can, but knowing that you've already done the heavy lifting as it pertains to "protecting" the game from that kind of behavior.
The Auction House
The "poor" itemization and AH is very much connected. Partly because they had to have droprates that didn't flood the AH with perfect items, but as it turned out AH still was flooded. On the other hand playing self found feels incredibly unrewarding (especially when comparing to stuff on AH). So on one hand droprates are to good for the to perfect distribution machine that AH is and at same time they are to low for those that don't use it.
The question is if loot was as it is now but without AH, would it still feel to have to small chance of improvements if we had nothing to compare to in game? Perhaps things like Armoury and other out of game ranking sites fills the same purpose and makes us feel we have "bad" gear.
Ha, I didn't even mention this point, good one! Yeah, of course they're connected, see Bashiok's post. I think there are two different dimensions to measure the impact of loot: 1) availability and 2) choice. I kind of think that the availability was is so crazy due to the AH, that we perceive loot as having no choice. You *need* to get trifecta, because it's out there in the AH. If you play self-found (or trading is more difficult, at least) you don't feel so constraint because you don't see every single item, and even if you know there's an amazing potential upgrade out there, it's not as easy to get anymore, so you might as well kill mobs to get it.
And yeah, the armory and Diabloprogress definitely make us feel like we have bad gear. I really thought without the AH (and increased drop rates, see Bashiok's post) the current system wouldn't even be that terrible. We need a reset though since we're now already tainted with AH loot.
Okay, I just browsed some other sources (Reddit, the official forum, IncGamers, ...) and it seems that the major tone there is the opposite of what I've said:
The removal of the AH is only one step, Loot 2.0 will be the measure of success and is far more important. And of course many still claim that the online requirement should be lifted as well.
Well, I'll wait until tomorrow, maybe post this on Reddit as well then, but still hope some people with different opinions will get to read this (and reply).
Not quite sure what to think of the conclusions, they seem completely in the wrong direction...
The main problem with the AH is that the gear evolution that a regular player would get over time is accelerated to an exponential degree. If you don't understand this statement, it is a bit at the root to why devs say the AH affected itemization. Say you are looking for some really good upgrade shoulders, but the game RNG is giving you none, well someone else in the game is obviously getting slightly different luck. The AH facilitates you finding that person and trading. Eventually you are both churning thru items looking for that 1 in a billion drop. This translates over time and eventually a new player who jumps in can skip a whole lot of the searching you first did because what was once rare is now trash.
Now without the AH, my problem is we go back a decade. People who were very successful in D2 or other similar games didn't find the loot they needed, they traded for it... Trading using painful or third party ways. 99.9...% of loot was still trash. Heck you fighted for it or cheated using pick up mods. To me just removing the AHs and doing nothing is far worst since it's ok to sometimes feel rewarded for being good at trading, it's not okay if you feel you need to trade using archaic late 90's techniques.
To me, if with loot 2.0 they can properly do away with the 1 in a billion items and get the game to a point where you might want to trade for incredibly specific things but for the most part you can get to whatever is the highest tier of gear within a reasonable time frame without trading... I'm all for eliminating the AHs since it would mean the game isn't flooded 6months down the line with items for the next guy to buy the game and instantly gear up.
On the other hand, if loot 2.0 is a bit of a bust and they still have items that range from "Mp 10 is easy brah" to "You won't kill the first inferno mob with this legendary man" then taking away the AH is just going to get players to migrate to some other forum, with likely a mad dash by web devs to recreate an AH.
The main problem with the AH is that the gear evolution that a regular player would get over time is accelerated to an exponential degree.
Hm, it's not an entirely "different direction" to what I'm saying. I agree that this gear evolution is accelerated due to the AH, but the fact that we even quantify our gear (in terms of money's worth) rather than determining our character's progress is, in my opinion, an even bigger problem. Note: this is not the case if you were already a D2 trading tycoon. But as we have seen in many polls and threads in the past, the majority of D2 players never traded, thus never "quantified" their gear. I have no idea how many PGs or HRs my gear was worth, and I may have sold very expensive items to Gheed.
So, the reason why you perceive my conclusions as "in the wrong direction" may be because you played D2 differently. This is also indicated by what you said here:
Now without the AH, my problem is we go back a decade. People who were very successful in D2 or other similar games didn't find the loot they needed, they traded for it...
What determined "success" in D2? You could beat the game self-found, and beating the game was success for me. No idea if you had to trade to become the first 99 on ladder, and you definitely had to trade to become #1 in DPS but afaik there was no "Diabloprogress" at the time. And if there was, no one I knew ever cared. All the people I knew where completely happy playing the game without trading and still deemed themselves successful. That's the difference - in D3, the drop rate is so low because of the AH that self-found you can't kill MP10 ubers, and this was for example my own measure of success (even with the AH, it took me and my friends quite a while). Again, I think by removing the AH, the drop rates will be increased, and self-found will become viable again, making trading optional again and not a requirement as it is now.
On the other hand, if loot 2.0 is a bit of a bust and they still have items that range from "Mp 10 is easy brah" to "You won't kill the first inferno mob with this legendary man" then taking away the AH is just going to get players to migrate to some other forum, with likely a mad dash by web devs to recreate an AH.
I think this is not just subject to items. For example, I have concerns regarding the unlimited paragon 2.0 points, or if they don't remove MF related to paragon, or if they create content that's only accessible with 1m+ DPS. Currently, a p100/500k DPS player gets about 20 times more loot (!) than the average joe with his low-paragon level, mediocre DPS character. That's just the same problem as in the real world: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Now (and bringing this back to my original post), I don't know if this was the case in D2 already, but due to the heavily connected community and the "comparison metrics" provided by the AH the game has changed. You can easily evaluate where you stand and how successful you are not by looking at how fast you kill monsters and how good the game play feels, but also how much your gear is worth and see what numbers others have.
I think that RoS is really about making changes to the game for the Diablo players, not the casual players.
This is a paraphrased quote that is not my own: "Blizzard tried to make a game that appealed to both casual and hardcore players. This ended up with a game that left the latter unsatisfied with the lack of depth and the former asking what the point was."
The expansion is a new direction the team has taken for the REAL fans, and for the players. I hope the attitude of the community shifts with theirs.
On the discussion, there are many parts of itemization that are essential to it's rewarding feel. I'll try my best to summarize my opinion.
1) The items make you wonder (for example): "What if I tried this, even if it dipped my dps a little?"
2) The items are fun improvements that are rare enough to feel awesome when they drop, but not too rare that its frustrating. Basically a sweet spot.
3) The items look AWESOME (this really is important, despite having no effect on gameplay)
4) You flip out on an occasional basis because you nerdgasmed over the unique effect on an item (subjective I know, but still the best feeling I've ever had in an RPG)
These are all extremely vague goals, but ones that are nonetheless important. Again, this is my subjective view on the matter
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But this doesn't affect me personally; bots decrease prices a bit by accelerating inflation, okay. But as long as real cheats or dupes aren't rampant, Blizzard has succeeded, in my opinion.
Since I put my hands on a Diablo game I played single player, I never felt the need for trade nor multiplaying, even if I liked community life a lot.
D3 imposed on me the limitations of both AH and online only.
I was one of those who argued against the AH system and set my resolve to play self found since release.
I still think it was the best choice for me, it reduced somewhat the impact of the AH.
But I couldn't do and cannot do and will not be able to do anything about lag spikes, disconnections and the like.
I cannot play HC, I cannot even play multiplayer.
I played a couple of times with Maka and enjoyed it but the game keeps lagging and lagging and it's tiring after a while.
Yet I understand the reasons behind it and accept the fact that we have to keep up with it even if it's just for lack of a better alternative.
Well, why not do that? No really, why not make a version of the game that can ONLY be played offline and does not interact with bnet in any way, other than to download updates? I'm sure there's a cost issue involved, but certainly less than what they had for console.
And no, console doesn't count
I don't see how that would be the case. What makes them that much more expensive? Do you know the technology behind them?
This is a valid arguments when it comes to Blizzard's competition, which constantly fails and close their servers (Warhammer Online being the latest example), but it has never been the case for Blizzard. Plus, the less people that play the less servers will be engaged in hosting them. The cost is already reduced.
The question is are there people working on that product while servers are also being maintained. That's what leads to big games failing, when dozens or hundreds of people are still working on them, but there's almost no return. That's not the case with the 20-something team that Diablo has. Diablo II is at this point on auto-pilot, with likely very small portion of the servers maintaining it. It costs Blizzard almost nothing to keep them up. But that's primarily because no one is working on it anymore.
Honestly, knowing that you can still play WarCraft II and Diablo I in Battle.net, I see no reason why Diablo III wouldn't exist 20 years from now. Unless Blizzard ceases to exist.
Ha. Bagstone.
Knock on wood.
But you're right, I really have no figures to back that up (nobody outside Blizzard does), and you're probably right about the costs going down once they stop active development.
Grats on 4000 posts, btw.
<3
Ha. Bagstone.
Well there's a big difference between a bot, which although is against the ToS, is not hacking (it's process automation), and duping/hacking.
Online-only squelched all duping from hacking (by that I mean decompiling the server code to exploit client-server interactions and create duplicate items). The only "duping" that existed in D3 that we know of was from account rollback exploits which is a customer service procedural issue and not an issue of hacking... and the RMAH gold duping bug, which was a bug, and not a hack.
The point being is that online-only actually has been tremendously successful at preventing duping/hacking. It's been so successful that botting is basically the only way to earn things without really earning them if you get my drift. The problem is that eliminating botting is much more difficult since bots are 3rd party programs and not related to secure code. Blizzard cannot do anything to stop simulated input (mouse clicks, etc), and they can't do anything about programs that read and interpret pixels on your screen... there's just no way to code against that. However, and I don't have any blue posts from back then, I don't believe Blizzard actually promised that online-only would prevent bots. If anyone has a link to the contrary, I'd love to see it, because that seems like a very naive statement to make for software developers who HAVE to understand that online-only won't do anything for bots.
The last thing I'd like to point out is that curbing duping is far more important than curbing botting. A duper can create "wealth" orders of magnitude faster than bots. The main appeal of bots is that you can gain items/gold while you normally wouldn't be playing. However, a duper, with a little work can make a couple 9/6 Mempos with 190+ main stat. In just a little time they can create wealth that would take a bot months to acquire normally. This was even evidenced by the RMAH gold duping bug - the amount of wealth that was created in a very short period of time by a relatively small percentage of the population far outstripped what that number of bots could accomplish in the same timeframe probably by several orders of magnitude.
With the RMAH gone, bots almost certainly will take a hit (and probably a large hit). Although, frankly, Loot 2.0 seemed pretty poised to taint the botters water. But, due to the fact that it's certain that fewer people will use 3rd party sites as compared to the RMAH, there MUST be less demand (even if demand actually goes up in the very short term) for the long haul.
The best way to combat bots is to make people not desire to swipe the credit card, not to try to ban the software. Hackers are ALWYAS one step ahead. It's a losing effort.
Just one thing to add: bots are very difficult to detect because a perfect player behaves exactly like a bot (no chatting, no social interaction, pure killing with optimal pathways and minimal downtime). A WW barb on a long weekend streak to farm the last 30 paragon levels "looks" 1:1 the same like a bot. Duping, however, can be prevented by an "online-only" mode, as every item has to be stored on the server and every item gets a unique ID, and the game can always check if this ID is really unique. Unless dupers find a way to dupe the item but altering the ID, duping is impossible. I would've never dared to say this 15 months ago, but it really seems like Blizzard found a way to stop (program code related) duping. I guess they know how to do it from WoW ;-)
Oh, ermm, I wasn't attempting to downplay the effect bots have, I was just trying to put some perspective to it all. Sorry if it sounded like I was saying that bots aren't a problem - they clearly are.
I just wanted to point out that duping has much more massive repercussions and is much easier to put a virtual lock on whereas botters have more modest repercussions and, no matter how much time is invested, will never be outright eliminated.
If you have to pick and choose your battles, it seems obvious to me that you'd take the dupers out of the equation, given how easy it is, and then work to mitigate the bots as best you can, but knowing that you've already done the heavy lifting as it pertains to "protecting" the game from that kind of behavior.
Ha, I didn't even mention this point, good one! Yeah, of course they're connected, see Bashiok's post. I think there are two different dimensions to measure the impact of loot: 1) availability and 2) choice. I kind of think that the availability was is so crazy due to the AH, that we perceive loot as having no choice. You *need* to get trifecta, because it's out there in the AH. If you play self-found (or trading is more difficult, at least) you don't feel so constraint because you don't see every single item, and even if you know there's an amazing potential upgrade out there, it's not as easy to get anymore, so you might as well kill mobs to get it.
And yeah, the armory and Diabloprogress definitely make us feel like we have bad gear. I really thought without the AH (and increased drop rates, see Bashiok's post) the current system wouldn't even be that terrible. We need a reset though since we're now already tainted with AH loot.
The removal of the AH is only one step, Loot 2.0 will be the measure of success and is far more important. And of course many still claim that the online requirement should be lifted as well.
Well, I'll wait until tomorrow, maybe post this on Reddit as well then, but still hope some people with different opinions will get to read this (and reply).
The main problem with the AH is that the gear evolution that a regular player would get over time is accelerated to an exponential degree. If you don't understand this statement, it is a bit at the root to why devs say the AH affected itemization. Say you are looking for some really good upgrade shoulders, but the game RNG is giving you none, well someone else in the game is obviously getting slightly different luck. The AH facilitates you finding that person and trading. Eventually you are both churning thru items looking for that 1 in a billion drop. This translates over time and eventually a new player who jumps in can skip a whole lot of the searching you first did because what was once rare is now trash.
Now without the AH, my problem is we go back a decade. People who were very successful in D2 or other similar games didn't find the loot they needed, they traded for it... Trading using painful or third party ways. 99.9...% of loot was still trash. Heck you fighted for it or cheated using pick up mods. To me just removing the AHs and doing nothing is far worst since it's ok to sometimes feel rewarded for being good at trading, it's not okay if you feel you need to trade using archaic late 90's techniques.
To me, if with loot 2.0 they can properly do away with the 1 in a billion items and get the game to a point where you might want to trade for incredibly specific things but for the most part you can get to whatever is the highest tier of gear within a reasonable time frame without trading... I'm all for eliminating the AHs since it would mean the game isn't flooded 6months down the line with items for the next guy to buy the game and instantly gear up.
On the other hand, if loot 2.0 is a bit of a bust and they still have items that range from "Mp 10 is easy brah" to "You won't kill the first inferno mob with this legendary man" then taking away the AH is just going to get players to migrate to some other forum, with likely a mad dash by web devs to recreate an AH.
Yay! Let's discuss!
Hm, it's not an entirely "different direction" to what I'm saying. I agree that this gear evolution is accelerated due to the AH, but the fact that we even quantify our gear (in terms of money's worth) rather than determining our character's progress is, in my opinion, an even bigger problem. Note: this is not the case if you were already a D2 trading tycoon. But as we have seen in many polls and threads in the past, the majority of D2 players never traded, thus never "quantified" their gear. I have no idea how many PGs or HRs my gear was worth, and I may have sold very expensive items to Gheed.
So, the reason why you perceive my conclusions as "in the wrong direction" may be because you played D2 differently. This is also indicated by what you said here:
What determined "success" in D2? You could beat the game self-found, and beating the game was success for me. No idea if you had to trade to become the first 99 on ladder, and you definitely had to trade to become #1 in DPS but afaik there was no "Diabloprogress" at the time. And if there was, no one I knew ever cared. All the people I knew where completely happy playing the game without trading and still deemed themselves successful. That's the difference - in D3, the drop rate is so low because of the AH that self-found you can't kill MP10 ubers, and this was for example my own measure of success (even with the AH, it took me and my friends quite a while). Again, I think by removing the AH, the drop rates will be increased, and self-found will become viable again, making trading optional again and not a requirement as it is now.
I think this is not just subject to items. For example, I have concerns regarding the unlimited paragon 2.0 points, or if they don't remove MF related to paragon, or if they create content that's only accessible with 1m+ DPS. Currently, a p100/500k DPS player gets about 20 times more loot (!) than the average joe with his low-paragon level, mediocre DPS character. That's just the same problem as in the real world: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Now (and bringing this back to my original post), I don't know if this was the case in D2 already, but due to the heavily connected community and the "comparison metrics" provided by the AH the game has changed. You can easily evaluate where you stand and how successful you are not by looking at how fast you kill monsters and how good the game play feels, but also how much your gear is worth and see what numbers others have.
I think that RoS is really about making changes to the game for the Diablo players, not the casual players.
This is a paraphrased quote that is not my own: "Blizzard tried to make a game that appealed to both casual and hardcore players. This ended up with a game that left the latter unsatisfied with the lack of depth and the former asking what the point was."
The expansion is a new direction the team has taken for the REAL fans, and for the players. I hope the attitude of the community shifts with theirs.
On the discussion, there are many parts of itemization that are essential to it's rewarding feel. I'll try my best to summarize my opinion.
1) The items make you wonder (for example): "What if I tried this, even if it dipped my dps a little?"
2) The items are fun improvements that are rare enough to feel awesome when they drop, but not too rare that its frustrating. Basically a sweet spot.
3) The items look AWESOME (this really is important, despite having no effect on gameplay)
4) You flip out on an occasional basis because you nerdgasmed over the unique effect on an item (subjective I know, but still the best feeling I've ever had in an RPG)
These are all extremely vague goals, but ones that are nonetheless important. Again, this is my subjective view on the matter